I built Laconia

By far my biggest personal accomplishment was writing Laconia (Source / frontend) from scratch - a project I created to learn MVC architecture, object-oriented design patterns, routing, authentication, security against database injection and XSS, and everything else that goes into a simple but modern web application. I learned so much making this, and I plan on writing an overview of everything I did from zero lines of code to completed project.

I made a new layout

Actually, I made 2-3 major layout overhauls in 2018, and I finally settled on this current version (4), which I documented here. It's always a big debate and struggle for me to make the site both functional and aesthetically pleasing without being boring yet still fast, easy to navigate, and uncluttered. So I've opted to go more in the direction of extreme simplicity with the current iteration, and focus as much as possible on having great content. I'm going to leave the design alone for a while.

I think the biggest issues with the current design is that there's no easy way to filter articles by subject, it lacks a bit of personality, and there's no good indication to the level of quality you'll find within.

I wrote 25 articles

I wrote 25 articles this year (leaving off any small snippet-like articles that don't really count), 11 of which were for other publications - DigitalOcean, SitePoint, EnvatoTuts+, LogRocket, Codrops, and Progress.

Next year, I'll write more for my own site, and less for third party publications.

LogRocket

Tympanus Codrops

Progress

I recorded 1 podcast

I recorded my first ever (released) podcast with Joel Hooks of Egghead.io. I'd be interesting in doing more audio and visual based things in the future, whether it's recording more podcasts, making videos, etc.

Email newsletter

As of writing this article, I have 2,609 subscribers to the newsletter I send out every now and then. It's mostly been an email I send out every time I write a few new tutorials, but moving forward I'm thinking of rounding up some of my favorite relevant dev-related articles by other authors and linking to those as well.

This website had 2 million sessions

According to Google Analytics, from December 15, 2017 to December 15, 2018, this website had 2 million sessions. About 1.9 million of those came from organic searches. Outside of the occasional Twitter or Reddit post, I don't market this site anywhere, so it's pretty cool to get so many hits.

For the first time, this year the three most popular articles were getting started with React, connecting to an API in JavaScript, and using JSON data - previously, articles on WordPress and Bootstrap were the most frequented.

What I wanted to learn in 2018

Here's the list of what I wanted to learn in 2018 according to my last post, and the ones I achieved.

Sockets, web sockets, understanding the relationship between client and server

React Native, Electron - making apps for mobile and desktop with technology I already know

Redux, Mobx - state management and observables in React and on its own

TypeScript - understanding the importance of strict typing

CI/CD and automation - I want to learn how to have a pipeline that goes from pushing a commit to Git to updating a develop + test environment

Testing - the difference between unit, integration, and e2e tests, and how to set it all up by myself - Drag and drop, scroll and window in JavaScript, despite how much I dread it

Projects

Migrate my site to a static-site generator - I'm on the fence about this considering how much time and effort it will take

Create a Laconia-esque MVC framework in Node.js - if I could do it in PHP, I should be able to do in in JavaScript-out-of-the-browser. I plan to frame this around making a Jira-esque program that's less horrible.

Create a unit converter for Slack - I want to make a simple Slackbot that converts weight and distance measurements for communities that have members on both sides of the pond.

Make a JavaScript one off series, of simple vanilla JS implementations of common elements and components, like accordions, tabs, modals, and tooltips

Some lower level stuff

And more

If I have a goal this year, it's that I'd really like to bring more art and music back into my life, something I've fiercely neglected.

I didn't accomplish any of my goals of 2018 except:

Get a full-time job as a web developer

Having a full-time job is a full-time job, so I didn't manage to write any courses or books or make any video tutorials, but I wrote a lot of articles on the side and tried to have a life. We'll see where next year takes me!

Thank you all for reading and sharing and emailing me. I plan to keep going and learning and improving into the next year.

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I'm Tania, a full-stack software developer specializing in modern JavaScript. I make
open source coding projects and write free, quality articles and tutorials that help
thousands of people daily. No ads, no sponsored posts, no bullshit.